Parents and Money
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Photo by Joe and Sarah licensed under Creative Commons
TheHonestDollar has a post up about how personal finance is like riding a bike. It’s a great post, and the comments got me thinking about training wheels and the role of parents in how we learn to ride bikes and handle money.
I learned to ride a bike when I was around five. My parents gave me a helmet and insisted that I wear it all the time, but they did not give me training wheels. Somehow I just figured out how to ride with the help of my older siblings, and things went from there.
That is a little like the way my parents handled training their children about personal finance. They taught me to never borrow money (that’s a little bit like wearing a helmet) but they did not give me anything else in the way of suggestions about budgets or credit scores, never mind financial help once I was eighteen (so no training wheels).
Since I decided that a college degree was worth much more than being debt free in my early twenties, I guess I am rather like a five-year-old riding a bicycle without a helmet or training wheels. Falling over has not been fun, but I hope that In Debt and I will figure it out eventually!
I think that I will probably handle things differently with my children, but I am not sure whether there really is any one best way to train children about finances. For those of you with children (or plans for them in the future) how do you plan to help them learn to manage their finances?
Very easy. Set a good example. Children will mostly imitate their parents unless the parents are completely unreasonable in which case the kids will eventually do the opposite of their parents. If nothing else, I think keeping financial matters hidden from children is a bad idea.
Posted on January 31st, 2008 at 1:43 pm[…] recently posted an entry asking those who have children (or plan to have them), how they intend to help their children learn […]
Posted on February 5th, 2008 at 6:48 pm